


The Art of Letters

by Sophia_Bee



Series: X-men Canon Compliant Fics [3]
Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Canon Compliant, Dark, Erik has Feelings, Holocaust, M/M, Nazis, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-15
Updated: 2014-10-15
Packaged: 2018-02-21 06:59:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2459075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sophia_Bee/pseuds/Sophia_Bee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik has always been on his own, crossing the globe, hunting down Nazis and seeking vengeance. Then comes the night he's pulled from the waters trying to stop Shaw by the entirely disarming Charles Xavier who violates every single rule Erik lives under. Erik knows their time is limited and starts writing letters in his head because unlike Charles, he's not good with words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Art of Letters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Magnolie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magnolie/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Dear Charles](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2435717) by [Magnolie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Magnolie/pseuds/Magnolie). 



> this is entirely canon compliant except for Erik's background as a Nazi hunter. It turned out a little darker than I expected.

Erik doesn’t have the gift of language. That’s one of the reasons he choses not to say very many words, which often leaves him standing on the outside of everything, watching with careful eyes but never saying much. If you asked him to write something down, to take everything that rumbles around in his head, he might give you a quizzical look and laugh, a dry, sarcastic hurumph of a sound, and tell you that he is neither an author or a poet. 

It’s not like his life has lent to long afternoons sitting around with time to put his thoughts onto paper. Erik is more apt to be found cleaning his gun than composing sonnets. Since the camps Erik has lived on the fringes of society, never staying anywhere for any length of time, always watching, always moving, and never finding what he’s looking for. 

That’s not entirely true. He does find what he’s looking for. Men living secret lives, fat and sloppy, sometimes drunks, sometimes men with loving families and adoring children. He knows their names, the names on paperwork authorizing trains full of human cargo to be taken down a path that ends up in smoke. Men who had watched human suffering without a second glance. In the end, he only thinks of them in terms of the way Erik assisted them to leave this earth. The slit throat in Amsterdam. The bullet in the brain in Buenos Aires. He does not care if their families weep for them. They never once wept for the families they destroyed, with bullets and starvation and finally gas and the crematorium. 

Erik’s world is not esoteric and philosophical. It’s gritty and real and when he looks at his hands sometimes he can still see the blood on them. He does not exist, he survives, moving from place to place, waking in one dingy, seedy rented room after another, always looking, always pursuing, and because no matter how many people he brings ultimate justice to, he can never find the one who hands strapped him down as a boy with intention and regret, telling him softly he wished they could unlock all this beautiful power any other way, but he cannot and Erik is the one who is forcing him. 

Sometimes Erik wakes in the night, gasping for air, screaming into whatever empty room he’s chosen to rest his weary body in, and it’s like he’s back there, strapped to the stainless steel table, Shaw telling him to manipulate a spoon or a sheet of metal one more time or there will be pain. None of the pain compares to how it felt to watch his mother’s brains splatter across the small office in the basement of the camp headquarters, but it still hurts and no matter how much he gets used to it, Erik hates that he always dreads it as well, and this makes him always do what Shaw wants him to, and he hates that too. Erik’s capacity for self-hatred seems to have no bounds. 

When daylight breaks and the room starts to fill with the dim light of the morning sun, and Erik is sufficiently numbed from the bottle of whiskey he had remembered to procure from the local store, he can see that once again his nightmares have left all the metal in the room twisted into various grotesque shapes. Out of control metal bender, he thinks to himself. 

Erik has no one in his life. It’s just him, wandering from place to place, except he always brings the hatred that burns brightly in his belly, that he feeds with the blood of his victims and that he knows will rule him the rest of his life. Considering what happened to him, it’s his god-given right. At least that’s what he tells himself. That’s the lie that lets him sleep most nights. 

Mostly Erik is alone. Nights become weeks, blend into months and stretch out to years of alone with only his revenge for company. Until he’s being pulled out of the water in Miami by some strange, pale creature who blinks at him and introduces himself as Charles Xavier. 

Charles is wordy. This is the second thing Erik notices about him. The first is his surname, and there's a good percentage chance he's not a Nazi on the run which means Erik will not have to kill him, but he makes a mental note to subtlety quiz him about his family history if he gets a chance just to make sure. This how it is for Erik. You’re either a Nazi and he is going to kill you, or why are you even bothering talking to him. His stoic insistence on monosyllabic grunts usually wards friendly people off. But these are unusual circumstance, and Erik is unable to maintain his unfriendly aura because he’s dripping wet and shaking with rage, and he suspects this Charles Xavier person wouldn’t care anyway because he’s watching him with these too bright blue eyes and talking non-stop. He’s going on about something. The ship, or asking what he was doing being trailed by an anchor chain behind a renegade submarine or saying something entirely ridiculous like, ‘you’re not alone.’ Erik has been alone since the day they ripped him away from his parents and sent him into Shaw’s embrace. What does this jaunty fellow with his posh British accent even know about anything. 

Erik would leave sooner, but he finds that he’s fallen into the most useful crowd. They seem to know things, government things, top-secret things, and usually Erik finds other people mostly in the way and entirely useless, but he decides to stick around because he thinks he can get something out of this situation. He stays on the fringes, watching, waiting until the right time and one day it arrives, and Erik is finally free, walking away with the key to finding Shaw tucked under his arm. 

Except he’s not. 

Charles is there, and he’s talking, using those words of his again, stringing them together to make actual sense and Erik finds that he’s standing there, blinking and listening. He’s actually listening. So he does something entirely uncharacteristic. He stays. 

It seems that Charles never shuts up. Whenever he’s around Erik he’s talking, going on about something and saying more ridiculous things like, ‘my friend’ as he places a soft hand on Erik’s arm that makes him flinch. Soft is the right word for Charles. Everything about him is soft and rounded and fuzzy, and Erik finds himself being strangely drawn in by someone he wouldn’t normally give a second glance. 

Charles seems to be always around, hovering, lurking, Erik isn’t quite sure what to call it. And he seems to be always touching Erik, softly, nervously, accidentally, purposely. Erik can never really tell what the touching means except that slowly, Charles manages to make it past the walls that Erik has kept carefully constructed for years. Erik almost doesn’t notice that in the the smallest of increments, all of his anger and revenge start to slip away, and he’s not sure if all of this is on purpose or maybe it’s a telepath thing. Actually, maybe it’s just a Charles thing. 

It seems that Charles never shuts up, until Erik finally manages to shut him up because, mein gott, he cannot stand the talking and the way that mouth moves, and it makes it so Erik can barely think. Finally, god, FINALLY, Charles actually has nothing to say when Erik kisses him, dark and long, although he does push feebly at Erik’s chest just after their lips meet, probably trying to pull away so he can fucking blurt somethingout, which makes Erik kiss him even harder. Erik enjoys the shocked silence. 

Erik is no stranger to kissing other men. And neither his Charles, judging from his enthusiastic response to Erik’s lips, as well as the fact that the moment their lips finally broke apart Charles mutters something about how he’d been waiting for this, and hearing Xavier start to chatter again makes Erik have to shut him up for a second time, this time wet and sloppy with tongues meeting and Charles practically melts into Erik’s broad chest. He tells himself that the third kiss is about stopping the endless verboseness he’s being subjected to, and ignores the fact that Charles actually wasn’t even attempting to talk that time and was instead gasping. 

This is different than Erik is used to. 

There had been this time of limbo after being liberated from the camps. He was stuck, unable to figure out where to go next, an orphan and a refugee, and even his tyrant master Schmidt/Shaw had at least given him some sort of structure, although it had been built on terror and pain. After liberation he faced having to endure people looking at his scarred torso and tutting at him, telling him he was lucky to have survived. Erik ended up with stomach cramps and diarrhea that quality food brought him. He did what every other camp survivor did, which was to return to the home he’d been dragged out of when he was eleven years old only to find it occupied by people who had been willing to find a new life from the spoils of war. 

Those people nagged at him, and every night he pictured them. Happy, smiling, sleeping in his parent’s room, not noticing the door jamb where it was damaged from the SS who had kicked in the door that night they came and took them all to the ghetto. He saw them every night for months until one night Erik decided what he needed to banish these ghosts. They were his first victims. That was when he started hunting and killing. That was when he stopped dreaming of what that family had taken from him because he’d taken it back. 

Erik Lehnsherr is not a nice man. a

His life after the limbo ends calls for any pleasure to be quick and without connection, so what Erik is used to is not Charles Xavier panting up against him and whispering in his ear that he would like to suck his cock, and the knowledge that if this indeed happens, they will not part ways to never see each other again but will sleep in beds just down the hall from each other, work together, go on a fucking road trip together (fuck themselves senseless on a fucking road trip? and this thought makes Erik grin). He’s used to faceless men in bars who play self-consciously with their wedding rings and let him fuck them in the back seats of their cars or up against the wall in alleyways stinking of piss and garbage. They are an easy, no-strings way for him to get the release he craves.

This is different. Charles is different, and Erik can’t stop his trajectory towards something he doesn’t understand, but he also can’t ignore that fact that no matter how many times Charles looks at him with those adoring, blue, innocent, wide eyes, this is not going to last. They have a beginning and they will have an end, but ultimately Erik will walk away, because ultimately the love of his life is not an academic rich boy Oxford graduate, but his cause. That’s what he tells himself. 

Charles is naive and optimistic and he spends too much time talking to Erik like they have a future together. He tells him that he wants to take him to Paris, and how wonderful Westchester is when it snows, and when this is all over they’re going to have a real dinner out together and pretend that something about them is normal. Erik smiles and plays along, his usual silence serving him well. 

Erik starts saying goodbye from their very first kiss. Well, he doesn’t actually say goodbye, because, as noted before, Charles is the wordy one, and obnoxiously verbal and no matter how much it makes Erik wince, Charles can’t seem to stop the torrent of words that spill from his bruised and swollen lips when Erik is buried balls-deep in his ass. Erik never says goodbye with words, but after a few long nights of fucking Charles every which way the other man will possibly let him, (and if Erik had been anyone else he might have thought he’d found nirvana) Erik starts to write Charles letters. 

He doesn’t put pen to paper. If he did, he would not be able to think of the best way to even begin: dear Charles, my dearest, my darling, my charles, love of my life. None of those things feel either right or wrong. He writes letters in his head, long missives full of run-on sentences and poor construction that usually begin with something like, ‘I never meant to hurt you,’. He whispers paragraphs across Charles skin, leaving an exclamation point on the jut of Charles’ hip bone, a semi-colon somewhere near his navel and endless adjectives that circle round his cock. He sobs chapters of regret into the crook of Charles’ neck. After some time it’s not letters he’s writing but novels, their story, a tragic tale that will not end well. 

Everything else outside of charlesanderikerikandcharles moves along at a fast clip, and they go on road trips, fucking their way around the country, finding mutants to bring home, and a merry little family starts to form around them, brash and joyful, and if Erik didn’t know this was all going to end, he might actually feel content. Their little group sustains an attack and they lose some members, and that night Erik holds Charles and whispers in his hair, runs a soothing hand up his back and Charles sags against him and sobs that he feels like the worst person on earth because out of all the loss, he just can’t stop thinking that at least Charles hasn’t lost HIM. Erik doesn’t say anything, just tilts those blue eyes up to him, studies the freckles that form a constellation across his nose while he adds a few paragraphs to his mental writings stating that he’s sorry that he was never Charles’ to keep in the first place. Later, as they are lying naked, facing each other, Charles eyes shining with tears, cheeks wet, arms wrapped around each other, so very close to each other, cock sliding against cock endlessly because somehow they both need this to be sweet and slow tonight and not the least bit dirty, Erik removes those paragraphs and throws them away. That part can be written at another time. Right now all he can do is hold Charles’ shaking body in his arms and try to provide some semblance of comfort, and for one brief moment it’s just the two of them, nothing more and nothing less.

Erik does actually try to write Charles a letter, but when he goes back to read his spidery scrawl he finds that it’s stiff and reminiscent of the German grammar school he want to before they made his mother sew that ugly yellow star on his jacket and the boys who had been his friends started throwing rotting food from the dust bin at him and taunting him all the way home from school. That didn’t last long because it was only a matter of weeks, or maybe even days, time is different when you’re ten years old, before Jews were told they couldn’t go to school at all. Erik had actually felt a little relieved. 

The letter is stilted and without emotion and Erik hates it, so he crumples it up and tosses it in the waste basket. Then he leans his elbows on his desk and closes his eyes and writes what he really wants to be able to say in his head. 

I will never stop loving you. Not until the day I die. And I know these words are not enough, will never be enough, and I’m sorry because I want to give you so much more. 

Erik doesn’t know that the end has arrived until it smacks him so hard in the gut that he can barely breathe, and Charles looks at him in a calm manner that says he thinks he knows what Erik’s almost visceral response to the knowledge that they have a location for Shaw is all about. Strangely enough, his sudden inability to take in a full breath without pain and the loud pounding of his heart in his ears has nothing to do with the coin in his pocket and his plans to drive it into Shaw’s head the same way Shaw sent a bullet into his mother’s, but being Erik Lehnsherr, who learned from Shaw to be cruel, he plans to do it very, very slowly. It has everything to do with the end of Charles and Erik, and Charles can’t even see it because all he can see is that once they do this, they can return and it will be their beginning, and they will move on and start the school he sometimes whispers excitedly to Erik about in the middle of the night. 

In a way it is a beginning, because Erik must move on to something else. It's inevitable. He’s been hunting and killing Nazis for years and their particular species is heading towards extinction, but there will always be people who want to hurt others who are different, and Erik will find them and kill them too. He will kill them all until anyone who will dare tell a mutant that they should not live their life as they please has had their heart stopped by Erik's hand. It’s a big job and big jobs don’t allow a person to fall in love with floppy hair, boyish charm and wide blue eyes. Big jobs require commitment and cause, and Erik Lehnsherr has plenty of both to give. 

At the end of the day, Erik makes his choice, but he knows he made his choice a long time ago. This time the choice comes with the bonus of Raven, long and blue and spitting anger, and a couple of Shaw’s thugs that will most likely come in useful. 

It also comes with loss, with accusation, with Charles on the sand, looking up at him, begging him to stay, to show him that he means something, more than some cause, more than revenge. Charles is not wrong. He means everything, and Erik will realize later that something about him will remain forever broken because of this.

He still turns away, turns towards that ridiculous name that Raven had thrown at him back when he was pretending he might never have to leave. He becomes Magneto, although he’s not entirely sure the cape suits him, and he’s freed of the silliness of loving Charles, back to being able to focus on the things that are important to him. At least that’s what he tells himself. 

They will see each other again. Most often on the opposite sides of things, but sometimes working together, and Erik will never be able to stop the deep pang of regret that sometimes almost cripples him when he sees the neverending accusation in Charles’s eyes. 

Charles is verbal, but Erik is the one who writes their story, composing chapters in his head, and the night before everything blows apart he can finally let go of the words. He needs to. He sits at the desk in his borrowed room as the winds outside Westchester howl, and he puts his pen to paper and writes. Charles will be in to see him soon, slipping through the door with a soft click, wrapping his arms around him, kissing him softly on the back of his neck. Right now, Erik is alone with his thoughts, and he pours them out onto paper, line after line, telling Charles all his feelings and all his regrets and at the end he says he hopes that one day Charles will understand, although Erik isn’t entirely sure he understands himself. He puts it into the bottom drawer of the desk, Charles’ name scrawled across the envelop, the sweet taste of glue still on his tongue. 

If Charles had found it soon after their end in Cuba, maybe things would have gone differently. Maybe he would have gone after Erik, told him there must be a different way, promised him they would find it together. Erik had been so sad and torn up in those days and weeks that Charles appearing at his doorstep would have been all it took to have him give up his ideals and return to Westchester and live happily ever after.

Instead Charles was recovering, lying in a hospital bed, his spine severed, his body no longer communicating its bottom half, angry and bitter and resentful that he actually missed Erik like crazy. He won’t find the letter for almost a year, when one day when he is sitting in his wheelchair in Erik’s room, missing Erik, running his fingers over the bedspread, remembering how it felt to be spread out, kissed until he was begging, and for some reason that is the day Charles pulls open that particular drawer in the desk and finds the letter. The letter with his name on it in Erik’s handwriting, and it causes his heart to skip. 

He reads it, his eyes gobbling up the words, unable to hold down the hope that maybe this letter will make all the pain make sense. It doesn’t. Charles answers Erik’s plea for understanding at the end of the letter, for some sort of peace that was actually never an option, telling him silently that he will never understand how something could be more important than the two of them together and that while Erik may haveasked for peace, he never really wanted it. Charles uses his telepathy to push that thought out far and wide, not caring if it actually finds Erik, but hoping he will hear. 

Somewhere, in a dingy hotel room in some random country, Erik jerks awake from a sound sleep with Charles’ name on his lips and he knows that Charles has finally found the letter. 

Miles apart and continents away both men weep for everything they’ve lost. 

~fin~


End file.
